Server Side Baking Update & Supported Viewers

Hello ZoHa Islands –

Server Side Baking or SSB as commonly referred to –  renders clothing layers, avatar’s skin, tattoos, alpha from the client side to the server much faster.

The major benefit to SSB is no more cloud avatars. This is because the baking [rendering] of your avatar is moving to the Region Server  your Avatar is standing in. This new method of baking eliminates delays in passing rendered information to all viewing your avatar.

Currently your avatar is rendered on your PC with information then transmitted to the server to distributed to others viewing you. Avatar rendering performance in the past was tied to the quality of the Internet Connection to and the speed of the the Client PC.

Those who delay upgrading to a modern viewer will still see avatars as before with the exception that the textures rendered by the SSB code may be missing from them leaving a white mask on the prim/layer shape. In addition to the SSB code upgrades, several other updates will also be rolled out at this same time.

The good folks at Linden Lab are testing server side baking for official Second Life Viewers which is projected for release within the next 2-4 weeks.

Supported Viewers as of April 25th – 2013

You can read more about SSB here or on our blog or on Firestorm’s Blog

Please check back for updates!